The delivery of web services promises to be the next wave of Internet-based applications.
There has been a strong emphasis by software vendors and service providers, as of late, to implement web service-oriented architectures that will provide a means by which companies can expose their offerings as web services.
In today's economy, the Internet is not only being used to provide information and perform simple e-commerce transactions but is also being used as a platform through which services are delivered to businesses and customers.
In this regard, services delivered by way of the Internet have typically been referred to as “e-services,” while the term, “web service” refers normally to an e-service delivered using standard web technology such as HTTP, XML, and SOAP. According to several market research firms, it is extremely likely that before the year 2005, many companies' offerings will be available as web services. In fact, the delivery of web services has recently been enhanced by the delivery of recently developed standards and tools that support the creation and delivery of web services.
Heretofore, the primary focus of web service, software vendor and other developers has been supporting providers and getting their specific web services up and running, as well as supporting customers and finding and accessing services. Following the implementation and support of the web services provided by a company, however, attention quickly shifts from creation, and delivery of these web services, to the management of same. As companies diversify in the types and numbers of web services which are being delivered, tools are needed to support and automate the web service management effort.
Heretofore, some research and development has been directed to these types of management concerns. For example, networks and distributed systems are probably the areas in which the most work on measuring and management issues directed to web-based services has been done. This research effort has resulted in the development of standards and commercial management platforms such as HP OpenView or IBM Tivoli. The mark “HP OpenView” and “IBM Tivoli” are the trademarks of the Hewlett-Packard and IBM Companies, respectively. Still further, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in the early 1990's proposed recommendations for measuring distributed software applications and for deriving statistics from collected measures. The basic component of the ITU proposed framework was a metric object. The metric object specifies how a certain application should be monitored by defining how it's attributes should be transformed into measures. The system provides a measure threshold above which a management application should be notified.
While the applications noted above have worked with some degree of success, these particular applications are concerned with metrics for distributed objects and which focus on interfaces and protocols for management applications and are normally concerned with performance and monitoring issues only. Further, they provide no specific means by which diverse web services can be managed with a high degree of efficiency.
Recently, several researchers have developed approaches to measure distributed objects running on top of middleware platforms. The majority of these contributions focus on the definition of quality of service (QoS) criteria. These research efforts are relevant to the most common metrics that business users want to analyze. However, these same approaches still fall short of providing a convenient analysis tool for use by those monitoring the delivery of web services. Moreover, the available research, techniques and prior art practices provided heretofore have proven to be less than flexible, and further require substantial modification, in the form of code writing, in order to make them useful in diverse web service applications.
Finally, the contributions provided in the prior art methods and other products provided heretofore in the area of managing the delivery of web services have been focused on the collection of performance measures to support availability and capacity planning, and have not been readily expandable to include other user defined management issues.
A platform and method for monitoring and analyzing data which addresses the perceived shortcomings attendant with the prior art practices utilized heretofore is the subject matter of the present application.